Poor old Nick Clegg. The deputy prime minister has exposed his vulnerable side in an interview in which he says he regularly cries to music, his children wonder why students are being so hard on him, and the only time he played tennis with David Cameron he lost.

"I'm a human being, I'm not a punchbag – I've got feelings," Clegg tells Jemima Khan in a revealing interview in the latest edition of the New Statesman. "The curious thing is that the more you become a subject of admiration or loathing, the distance seems to open up between who you really are and the portrayals that people impose on you … I increasingly see these images of me, cardboard cutouts that get ever more outlandish.

"One thing I've very quickly learned is that if you wake up every morning worrying about what's in the press, you would go completely and utterly potty."

At home in the evenings, Clegg likes to read novels and he says that he cries regularly to music, although this is not, strictly speaking, breaking news: Clegg did make similar remarks in an interview with Radio 4 last year.

Talking about his family, he tells Khan: "What I am doing in my work impacts on them emotionally, because my nine-year-old is starting to sense things and I'm having to explain things. Like he asks: 'Why are the students angry with you, Papa?'"

He adds that members of the public often express support but whisper their congratulations, "as if it's a guilty secret saying anything nice about Nick Clegg".

Clegg insists that his relationship with David Cameron – whom he calls "Dave" – is not particularly close. "We don't regard each other as mates and actually I don't think it would be a particularly healthy thing if we tried to become personal mates." When Khan mentions talk that the two men play tennis together, Clegg squirms. "No, no – well, er, I think we've played one game of tennis. Of course we meet from time to time but it's always basically to talk about what we're doing in government." Who won? "Ah no, that's a state secret," Clegg jokes. (Cameron won, Khan reveals.)

Khan also asks Clegg what he thinks about News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, being a regular guest at David Camerons' dinner parties. "I don't know anything about Oxfordshire dinner parties. I'm assuming that they weren't sitting there talking about News International issues," says Clegg.

"Look, you're putting me in a very awkward spot. If you've got an issue with it, speak to Dave. I don't hang out in Oxfordshire at dinner parties. It's not my world. It's never going to be my world."

Clegg also signals a changed identity for the Lib Dems. He said: "I don't even pretend we can occupy the Lib Dem holier-than-thou, hands-entirely-clean-and-entirely-empty-type stance," Clegg says. "No, we are getting our hands dirty, and inevitably and totally understandably we are being accused of being just like any other politicians."

On the manifesto pledge not to increase tuition fees, he insists that it was not one of his main manifesto priorities: "I didn't even spend that much time campaigning on tuition fees."

Clegg has had trouble with interviews in magazines before. In 2008 he told Piers Morgan in GQ that he had slept with "no more than 30" women, a remark that sparked a thousand dyspeptic headlines.